The Abative Effect: A New Term to Describe the Action of Antecedents that Reduce Operant Responding

Abstract

Behavior-analytic terminology concerning the so-called inhibitory effect of operant antecedents lacks precision. The present paper describes the problem with current nomenclature concerning the effects of antecedent events that reduce operant responding and offers a solution to this problem. The solution consists of adopting a new term, abative, for the effect in question. This paper suggests that the new term has several advantages over terms currently used and that adopting this term will yield a variety of practical and theoretical benefits, including, but not limited to, a more consistent vocabulary to describe antecedent-behavior relations.

Establishing terms: A commentary on Edwards, Lotfizadeh & Poling's “Motivating operations and stimulus control”

“…Cases involving increased responding have been called evocative effects (e.g., O'Reilly et al, ) or, in some contexts, potentiating effects (e.g., Edwards et al, , where the issue is whether establishing operations can enhance some effects of discriminative stimuli). Those involving decreased responding have been called abative effects (e.g., Laraway, Snycersk, Michael & Poling, /2002).…”

Reducing Transition Latency and Transition‐related Problem Behavior in Children by Altering the Motivating Operations for Task Disengagement

“…For Greg, similar reductions were seen during the first intervention condition. These results may be described as a momentary abative effect (Laraway, Snycerski, Michael, & Poling, ) that resulted from reducing the children's overall engaged time in the pretransition activity. It is also possible that the interruptions, attention, and resumption in the activity created a schedule of reinforcement for problem‐free disengagement from the preferred activity and/or reduced the unpredictability of the upcoming transition above and beyond that of the picture schedule alone (Flannery & Horner, ).…”

A Preliminary Investigation of Visual Goal Markers to Prompt Fluent Oral Reading

“…Thus, for the first five weeks of the project, these students may not have seen the goal marker as something that was attainable. The results of such conditioning may have been to abate oral reading fluency in the presence of visual goal markers (Laraway, Snycerski, Michael, & Poling, 2002).…”